Open the pod bay doors

Open the pod bay doors

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am a total podcast junkie, politics, social issues, science and tech and comedy, history, culture, If you’ve recorded it, I’ll listen to it. (Not Hannity or Info Wars… I tried, I’m sorry…NO ! ) What is a podcast? if you’re a millennial or younger you can probably scroll past this bit, but for those of you looking at me like ….“you mean radio, don’t you ?”

It refers to a type of digital media which can best be described as Radio on demand, listen when you want, as many times as you want on computers, or mobile computing devices, on nearly every conceivable subject, or point a view on nearly every conceivable subject. There are a variety of services which you can subscribe to your favourite, which include but are by no means limited to:

Apple ITunes (Obviously…..)

Sound Cloud (I only found this one when I couldn’t stream NPR at work.)

Spotify (Yeah, they do…its relatively new.)

Stitcher Radio (is free, but they also have a subscription service which for $50 dollars Australian per year, gains you access to both commercial free and bonus content.)

A number of digital media outlets, like Politico, Slate or my favourite Crooked Media
(check out their merch, its great) provide both audio & written content which complement each other. Many, but not all provide subscription based services which grant access to commercial free content, as well as additional content not available to the general public.

Podcasts are big business these days reaching a global market, according the pew research centre released stats for online radio consumption in the US and shows a steady growth in consumption over the past several years, which seems to track more globally. According to an article at Atlantic.com adverting costs for an episode is between 25 to 40 dollars per 1000 downloads, so a popular episodes which may get a 1 000 000 downloads, can earn anywhere between $25 000 to $40 000 dollars per episode.

That concludes my talk on Podcasts, thank you listening….NO WAIT!!!, wrong medium, but if you want a more detailed analysis of the business model let me know….I know a guy….believe me !

Every week or so I will be reviewing a podcast or podcasts I have discovered which I think is worth listening to, which I hope the 3 of you who aren’t my extended family and actually read this site will enjoy.